


unstitch the suture

by falterth



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, POV Fate, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-25 05:29:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16191053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falterth/pseuds/falterth
Summary: You are fate and fate is in love with Uzumaki Naruto.





	unstitch the suture

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starlineshine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlineshine/gifts).



> title lifted from the song [a knife in the ocean](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-n4U2KZZVs) by foals

Some people think fate is a red string. The Hyuuga boy thinks you are the mark on his forehead. The Akimichi heir thinks you're Nara Shikamaru's hand extended to him on a lazy summer day. Haruno Sakura thinks you're the last of the Uchiha. The last of the Uchiha thinks fate is a dead brother, and Naruto thinks you are the Hokage's hat and everything it symbolizes. You know better than them. You are a jagged edge, a shard of glass. But, you think, you will be anything Naruto wants.

On the day he is born, your eyes are drawn inevitably toward him. He is the sun and you are drawn to his light. You know he will do great things and you know you can guide him. If you reach out you can feel your fingertips brushing against his potential. You are fate, the guiding force of this world. You are fate and fate is in love with Uzumaki Naruto.

You could change things. Naruto’s parents are taking their last stand against a great beast and you are drifting off to sleep, thinking, _I could change things,_ but you don’t. His parents love Naruto and he is yours so if they want to throw their lives away for him you won’t stop them. Naruto outshines any potential they ever could have had so you let them die with no remorse. You are fate and fate’s eyes fall slowly, slowly shut.

You sleep until Naruto is old enough for you to do something about it, old enough for you to touch that potential without burning yourself away. You want it so bad—sometimes you are nothing but a string of thoughts, a string of words, an endless mantra chanting _Naruto, Naruto, Naruto._

You sleep through talks of a coup and you sleep stone-cold and still when Uchiha Shisui throws himself backwards off a cliff, blind and crying and smiling. You crack an eye open when Uchiha Itachi massacres his whole family. You watch distantly, sleepily, gathering yourself in preparation for something more. This could have been prevented, you think. It is your job to damn those who have taken too much and it is your job to give to the ones who haven’t gotten enough. You are fate and the Uchiha have been robbed. You could give back to them but you don’t.

You care only for Uzumaki Naruto.

Uchiha Sasuke’s mother dies and you fall back into your slumber. Sasuke is alone with no one to guide him and you do not care enough to reassure him. While he tries fruitlessly to clean the bloodstains out of the floor, you dream of sunshine. He curses his brother and you think, I could change this. I could set him on a better path. You could, but you don’t care enough to help him.

Fate sleeps.

You sleep through the murder of Hyūga Hiashi’s twin brother. You sleep through Neji and the cursed seal and you sleep through his hatred. Your dreams darken, just a little, when Neji pledges himself to fate and fate for him isn’t you, it’s the ugly mark on his forehead. You think: it doesn’t have to be like this. You could change something, but you only want to change Naruto. You sit back and are dimly aware of Neji falling, falling, falling, reaching out during the middle of the night for someone who will never be there again, taking his anger and envy out on the heir to the clan and ruining her forever, and you do not care.

Off in a faraway land, you ignore the mad laughter of a one-tailed demon and the broken cries of its host. You are saving up all of your love for one person and Gaara is a nonentity, a nobody. You plan to keep it that way. You sleep and you breathe—in, out, in-out—and with every slow breath dozens die to Gaara's sand. Their fearful pleas scratch at your ears and you do nothing but lift your hands and shut out the noise. They are not Naruto. They do not matter, and neither does the fear of Gaara’s older siblings. You allow them to fear for their lives. You choose not to act.

In a place where the only kind of shelter is long grass, you allow a little girl and her mother to be used day in and day out. You allow people to sink their teeth into flesh that was never meant to be bitten. You allow them to clutch each other in the early hours of the morning with nothing but their clothes and their stark terror for comfort. The mother dies—you do not wake. Your eyes do not open. You are fate and you sleep.

You are fate and fate’s gears grind to a slow and steady halt.

 

Everything you do you do for Naruto, and it starts with Mizuki. You addle Mizuki’s senses. You cloud his vision and his judgement and when Naruto stoops over the scroll you open his eyes and allow him to understand. The jutsu comes to him naturally. Your eyes are open too and you watch him and something like greed curls up in your chest. He is _yoursyoursyours_ and you will never let him go, even though you will eat those words later. You weave the glowing threads. Broken glass glitters in the air and you plant a seed of urgency in Iruka’s gut, spurring him onward and out until he bursts into the clearing, breathing heavily (although you will make sure he never runs out of energy, not so long as Naruto is in danger), kunai already drawn. You make sure Naruto is safe. If he dies here you will lose the light in your hands.

You are fate and you will hold onto him until your hands are dust.

Naruto is assigned to a team with the last of the Uchiha and the Haruno girl. You care for neither of them. You do not care for Kakashi, his teacher, even though you hear him every night at the memorial stone asking for his own lights back. You spared a fleeting thought for him once, before Naruto was born. Now he is nothing to you. You look at Naruto’s team with cold eyes. You think: he deserves better than this. You want to give him better but you cannot. The four of them are a stained-glass masterpiece ready to break apart at any moment but the threads behind the glass are braided together so tight it burns when you try to take it apart.

You are fate and fate is a jagged piece of glass. Your sharp edges cannot seem to reach the entity you have come to know as Team Seven.

 

A demon attacks your boy. Momochi Zabuza flirts with death so you give it to him and they lay his body out next to Haku’s, next to the body of someone you could have loved but never did. Snow falls from your fingertips. Uzumaki Naruto wears a fine crown of ice crystals made bitter by the death of someone he’d helped in a long-ago forest. Whenever your eyes turn to him the world grows darker by a few degrees. He has never seen death before. Better for it to happen like this. Only you know what could have happened if you’d let the Uchiha die.

(Uchiha Sasuke stares wide-eyed into the darkness. Unseeing and unknowing—but he will know. You'd thought he was dead. "My body just moved on my own," he'd said and only you knew this was true. Now he stares wide-eyed, dark of his irises a mirror of a cloudy sky. He's alive. He didn't die this time. He almost died for Uzumaki Naruto. You would have made him die for Uzumaki Naruto. The Haruno girl has her arms wrapped tight around him and he’s staring at something unseen, something so far beyond her. She’s clutching him and he’s staring too far away to care.

You can see it in him. Uchiha Sasuke wasn't ready to die. Now he stares wide-eyed and frozen, muscles tight and fingers twitching, blood still smeared on his skin and his life so close to slipping free he's almost choking on it. You would have had him die for Uzumaki Naruto. You would have had him die. He was starting to love Naruto but not quite, was on the edge of a doorway into something other than revenge and anger and screams. He was starting to love Naruto and Naruto is _yours_ and if he loves what you love he can die for it. You watched him watch his family die, watched him scrape off blood dried on the concrete steps of the Uchiha compound. You've distantly watched him cry and distantly watched him shake and distantly seen more of him than he's ever dug from himself.

You slept through it all.

You would have him die for Uzumaki Naruto. Uchiha Sasuke wasn't ready to die. He stares wide-eyed and you want him to know if there's another point, another moment where you have to choose, you'll pick Naruto. You want him to know that. He stares wide-eyed and unseeing and he knows the universe has forgotten about him. You are fate and fate grows cold and no matter how much Sasuke begs you will never save him again. You shut your eyes.

Haruno Sakura is not important enough for you to even glance at, so you don’t. You let her fall to the wayside and you answer exactly none of her endless prayers for help. Uzumaki Naruto loves her and you know he doesn’t really love her but it burns like you burn when you get too close to Naruto so you let the world forget about her and when she goes down her own path you spare nothing for her. If she wants to defy fate she can pay the price. Sakura is subpar and Naruto thinks he loves her and you will never forgive her.

Your fingers weave the tapestry of time and time revolves around Naruto, a blaze of orange and red, the sun rising over a burning wildfire. You are fate and fate does not braid anyone else into its plans.)

 

Hatake Kakashi nominates Team Seven for the Chūnin Exams. You seethe quietly and resign yourself to collecting light in your hands until it is time to change something. You take from Naruto’s potential and you twist and braid until it resembles a thick golden cord. Your hands bleed. This is what happens when you brute-force the way of things but you are fate, the center of all time and space, a guard(amning)ian god, destroyer or granter of dreams. Naruto has a dream and you will never let it die.

During the first stage of the exam, you breathe into Naruto’s soul until his hand is glowing red-hot with the need to raise it up, up, up, and you can hardly look because it is so bright. You place words in his brain, make them a little louder, step back, and watch it unfold.

Naruto will never give up and neither will you and you breathe and this time it isn’t a breath laced with sleep, it’s a trembling breath full of desire and want and greed. His resolve glitters like gold but is stronger than steel, a spiderweb of conviction. You made it this way and you will never take it back. Uzumaki Naruto will have his way. Team Seven passes the first exam and in the second exam they are attacked by Orochimaru.

You cared for the snake once. You cared about them when they slid on their belly, fleeing Konoha, fleeing the dark and falling into the abyss. You were there when their mothers died. You cared once so you let them go free and you let Sarutobi Hiruzen tell himself it couldn’t be helped. Now you are indifferent, and your only concern is for Naruto. You give him the strength he needs to defeat the snake summons, those huge, vile things, and you send him to sleep with a brush of your hand tapping light touch-touch-touches all across his face. He is safe and you are the driving force in this world, just starting to awaken and realize its potential, and you let your eyes droop when you turn your eyes to the Uchiha boy.

You could stop Orochimaru from biting Sasuke but you don’t because he doesn’t deserve your attention. Sasuke knows fate has forgotten him, knows the world has turned cold all around him and he will never escape your ire. Fate burns cold and grey and so does Sasuke. He will never expect anything from you again and maybe once you would have mourned for him but now you’re only glad. Maybe once, if Naruto had never been born and you’d never fallen in love with him, you’d care more about Sasuke. But Sasuke had been stumbling blindly, tripping, fumbling around until he’d found a switch and flicked it and his body had moved on his own. Uchiha Sasuke is beginning to love Naruto, and if he loves what you love he can die for it.

You see the Haruno girl in a clearing with a kunai to her neck and you take a shaky breath—in, out—and your hands twitch. It would be easy to do nothing. It would be easier still to suggest to the Oto girl that killing Sakura is necessary. Naruto thinks he loves her but he doesn’t love her and you know he doesn’t because you love Naruto and you know what love is. You wait too long and hair goes flying, pink on wood, and you accept the defeat gracefully.

She is insignificant and she will die eventually. The when and the how are out of your control, one of the few things even you can’t touch, not yet at least. You have a glowing potential in your hands, all of Naruto’s choices for the future, and you will keep looking through the threads until you find one you can manipulate. You love Naruto so you will search for his isolation even if it takes a hundred years. Naruto thinks he loves her and you know he doesn’t. Sakura doesn’t love Naruto and if she doesn’t love Naruto then she can die. You see the way she hits him and you breathe out, a whirlwind of anger, and you search. Even if it takes a hundred years, because you are fate and fate waits for everybody.

After all is said and done and Sakura is saddled with the task of carrying Naruto and Sasuke back to the tower. Your eyes are only open because Naruto is there and you only hear her pleas for someone to help her with her burden because you are listening close to Naruto, treasuring each and every one of his heartbeats.

It could have been different but it isn’t so you bend the girl’s back a little more, increase her burden. Sweat pours down her face and you would do worse but you have not yet found the thread, so Haruno Sakura makes it to the tower and she lives. You pass her over completely in favor of making sure Naruto has enough strength to survive. You make sure he wakes up in time to fight with the Inuzuka boy who thinks fate is the face of his dog and you make sure he wins. Toward the end of the fight you sit back and watch him. Naruto shines bright with determination and fervor. You bask in it, soak it all up and you are fate and you know what love is and this is love.

 

A month passes under your watchful eye.

Naruto is made to fight and without your help he would lose. But he is lucky because you love him so much you can hardly bear it sometimes, and you guide him to victory. You take pleasure in shattering the Hyūga boy’s definition of fate. He will not sully your name any longer. What the Hyūga do is none of your concern and has not been in thirteen years. The cursed seal is out of your hands now and you could change things but you don’t because Naruto is the only one worth doing anything about. You let yourself nod off during the other fights. Every time Naruto changes something he pulls on your power and you have a quite a bit of it in reserve but you need more, ever more to make the changes you want to see. A growing supply of potential rests behind your eyelids. One day you will open your eyes and full and your love will shine down on Naruto. The fights go on. Tension builds.

You are fate and you do not stop the Konoha Crush. Orochimaru kills Naruto’s jiji. You feel a vicious sort of happiness when he finally falls, and you watch, emotionless, as Orochimaru’s arms are taken away from them. You used to love Orochimaru and maybe you still harbor a little bit of affection for them because they escape with their life intact that day. They are a cockroach underfoot; try as you might, you can’t seem to bring yourself to kill them. Their potential has long run out. They’ve reached their peak already. But you have plans for them still so you let them escape.

You are fate and fate is a biting edge.

Naruto goes to retrieve an old woman and his definition of fate expands just a little. You strain against it. Your jagged edges scrape screech scream against the metal casing. Naruto thinks fate is the Hokage’s hat and everything it symbolizes and now he thinks fate is his baa-chan, and his ero-sennin. You are fate and you are fair but you don’t feel like playing the game now. You push with everything you can. Light from your hands rains down like fire and you put Tsunade out, drag her under her own consciousness and urge her to see Dan, to see Nawaki, to see everything she tells herself she won’t look at anymore. Naruto’s definition of fate is expanding, ballooning. You are not willing to let anyone or thing in. Fate has time for Naruto only.

By some twist of destiny beyond even your control the old lady gets up. Senju Tsunade lives instead of dying by Orochimaru’s hand like you would have had her do, and Naruto is the one who inspires her. You want to tell him to stop. Your love should be enough for him but it isn’t because he doesn’t know you’re there. Your love should be enough to keep him going—it is enough to keep him going, really, because he’d be dead many times over without your interference—but he keeps looking for more. You only indulge him because you love him so much. Senju Tsunade lives and you let her return to the village without trouble.

Jiraiya is another issue. You used to care for him so much. You let him take in those three students and you refused to let those students fall to the wayside. And then Uzumaki Naruto was born, and you let their identities crumble in the face of your indifference. You’d done the same thing for Jiraiya and had quietly hoped he would stay away from Konoha forever. But he is here and you can’t kill him now. He will teach your Naruto, your precious child, things you can’t. But he will die one day and your revenge for his existence will hurt everybody who ever knew him. You are fate and fate’s hand passes over a white-haired teacher, not stopping long enough to even brush against him.

Naruto returns to the village with one more precious person and another skill learned.

Something shifts, a tiny grain of sand in the dunes of time and space, and you see your chance so you take it. You hack away at the braid. You could not do this before but you do it now and it feels wonderful. Team Seven comes apart like a fraying thread and you are fate and fate cannot smile but just this once you wish you could. If fate could smile it would smile down on your Naruto.

Uchiha Sasuke breaks away from his village and you make sure the rescue mission fails. Uzumaki Naruto makes an empty promise to an empty girl whose head is full of nothing put paper-thin dreams for the future based on delusions that went up in flames the moment Orochimaru stepped foot past the village gates. Haruno Sakura is left devastated that day, another weak needle jabbing into your priorities and you tear into her with a savageness completely unlike you. You are fate and fate leaves Sakura with no hope for the future.

She is granted an apprenticeship with the Godaime Hokage. She could be so much more but now she will only ever be a fraction of what she could be. You give her power but you don’t give her enough and maybe you could have loved her once. Maybe. But you don’t, not anymore, because you are fate and fate loves Uzumaki Naruto too much to let anyone else eat up its attention.

Sasuke leaves the village thinking he’s breaking the chains that hold him down. You laugh because the chain on his neck, made of ink and hatred and snake-chakra, is far heavier and far more deadly than any leash Konoha could have put on him. Sakura learns to thrust her hands into the light and have them come out stained green-and-life and she spends more time in the hospital than not, more time on the training ground than in her home. She doesn’t check in on Naruto much at all, only letting herself be dragged to the occasional meal at Ramen Ichiraku—the promise still hurts and you keep it that way. The last person to break away from the team is Naruto who knows when he’s not wanted. Good, you think. The only person that should want him this much is you. Naruto leaves the village with Jiraiya, head down and shoulders slumped, thinking maybe something good will come out of this training trip.

The braid comes apart.

 

Three years is a good, solid time for you to sleep. You are fate and fate plants a seed inside Uzumaki Naruto’s soul—the seed of potential grew long ago, taller and leafier than any of Fire Country’s forests. This seed is the seed of an unshakable power, burning so hot you can’t hold it in your hands for more than a few breaths at a time. Naruto and his teacher step outside the gates and the seed takes root. It is hard to close your eyes. Fate is awake; the ripples Naruto’s caused are like needles jabbing into you everywhere they possibly can. Somehow, slowly, over the course of a week and a half, during which Naruto and Jiraiya spend sleepy nights taking watches, you convince your eyes to close.

The first year passes and you open an eye to make sure he is okay. You nourish the seed. Sometimes, when you turn your gaze onto him in the dead of night when he should be sleeping, blue eyes open wide in the dark, searching for something they will never find. Fate holds its breath. Naruto closes his eyes. The world keeps spinning and the Toad Sage, sleeping in the same room and even more attuned to the elements than Naruto is, sleeps peacefully. You figure it’s about time you closed your eyes again.

You used to love Jiraiya. You don’t anymore and you would just as soon see him dead as have him teach Naruto but the decision had been out of your hands—so instead, you make sure Naruto learns everything he’s taught. Your boy isn’t the brightest but he is yours. You are fate and fate takes care of its own, so against every odd Jiraiya is a competent teacher and Naruto is an apt student. You never would have done this before. You never would have cheated reality like this, but this—it’s after. Naruto had been born, a glowing golden knot of potential, strings beaded with broken glass braided into thousands of tiny red lines and you had hungered for it.

You do not pay for your actions, no matter how selfish they were. You are fate and fate exacts a price on everything but itself. You watch people suffer during those three years, thousands of pleas that went unanswered, a boy refusing to ask you for help knowing you would never grant it and trying desperately to resign himself to counting down the days until his body is no longer his, a girl who can punch through rocks like paper (-thin dreams) but looks to the sky after practice wondering if she could have ever been something else.

Yes, you want to tell her. _Yes._ You could have. But now you will never be.

You crack the Uchiha’s mind open like an eggshell and his thoughts drip out onto your palms. He loves too strongly, too violently. He dreams of a hand buried in his only friend’s chest, of the shadow of a girl he’d never tried to get to know following him from the corner of his eye. His shoulders shake. The cot is hard underneath his back. The ink-chain burns on the tender meat of the curve where shoulder and neck meet. He dreams of a district filled with dark-haired people. He dreams of a dead friend. He dreams of a girl whose name he barely remembers. He dreams of two fingers poking his forehead.

Uchiha Sasuke will never kill any of the people he’s set his sights on. You are fate and fate abandoned him when his brother killed the entire family and made a stranger of the last blood relative he’d ever see for years to come. But Sasuke never feels the full weight of your gaze. Your eyes are twin spotlights of disaster and fortune and you have only ever kept your left trained on him.

(Far away, in Wind Country, the Kazekage’s youngest son takes up the mantle for himself. It could be sad. You could mourn for the loss of the rest of his childhood. But you don’t.)

Another year passes. You are fate and fate’s lungs draw in air, the potential for something to happen. You are fate and fate’s lungs expel every little thread they’d welcomed in and they scatter, useless, in the winds of time. A ghostly breeze blows down the braid which now hangs in tatters, scarred and torn and defeated. You are proud.

The seed is swollen with power but you keep it at bay. Naruto does not need this yet and you will keep it contained for however long it takes. The world turns. The seasons change. The boy who thought fate was a cursed seal on his head rises through the ranks of the system and you spare him a passing though. Maybe you could have loved him.

Nothing else happens so you fall onto your back and sleep, buried in the leaves of the tree of potential. You sleep while people in black-and-red cloaks hunt down Naruto’s brethren. You care nothing for them. It is simple; if they come close to your boy you shall see to it that they die.

You sleep. The world turns. Nature breathes. Another year passes and Naruto and his teacher begin the journey home.

 

The tight hold you have on your power slips. You lose an inch or so here, an inch or so there.

You are fate and fate plays by the rules. You can feel your fingers dissolving whenever you pluck the strands of destiny, gathering them to your chest, watching over Naruto as he roams the elemental countries doing the bidding of a system that aims to corrupt him. You are fate and fate looks back and thinks: _I’ve left the rules in the dust._ You’ve pulled too much, searched too hard, tempted a power greater than your own.

You are fate and fate lies on the ground hardly able to move or see, leaves of a long-dead tree rotting above you.

How did it come this far?

You know how it happened but you don’t want to think about it. Naruto grows in leaps and bounds, perfecting every technique he knows until he starts to branch off and make new ones, and you sleep but the more you sleep the weaker you become. You thought you’d been saving up for something. Now you reach the end of the string and your fingers curl around empty air, searching for more. When he was born, Naruto’s potential had shone like the sun. You were a moth drawn hopelessly to his light. Now he is sixteen and he is a dying candle, ready to wink out at the slightest breeze, ignorant that his peak has come and gone.

You held his potential in your hands and then you squandered it. You are unpracticed. You have never bent reality for anything or anyone as much as you have for him and it shows in the cracks winking in and out of the scope of your senses. You hold your hands over the cracks but your hands are made of air and dust now, shadows of what they used to be. Once you could have moved mountains across all of time with a flick of your finger as you did once for a lonely half-starved traveler who needed a pass. Now you can barely stir the breeze.

Naruto’s eyes shine like bright blue spotlights in the dark looking for something he will never be able to find and you are fate and fate lies curled in the corner of the room in which he sleeps.

The war marches on, an insignificant thing in the eyes of an entity as old and powerful as you—except it isn’t. Naruto comes into close contact with death once, twice, three times. You find yourself unable to stop it and with each day that passes, each time death’s wings pass over your child, you are confronted by truth and reality: you have gone about this all wrong.

The seed wilts.

You know what you must do.

You use what is left of your hands to pick up the broken pieces of a future that could have happened if you had handled things the way you were supposed to. Fate is a jagged edge, a shard of glass. The color bleeds away and you are left with a crystal-clear view of the world crumbling around you. You are not sure what shocked you into action but for the first time in sixteen years you are no longer blinded by a false sun. You pick up the glass and you glue it on over the world, painting a picture of what could have been saved.

The hardest part comes last. Your boy is a fighter and if you know him at all you know he will not go down so easily.

This is the only way to protect him. Your boy is sleeping but when you turn your eyes on him he sits up in bed, grabs one of those weapons of his, and watches. The last piece is in your hands. You are fate and fate kisses Naruto goodbye. Up in your starry home you glue it into place, pieces onto a perfect past.

It hurts. You know it hurts but you don’t let it stop you because to ignore this would be to tear down everything you have ever stood for. Maybe you can make it up to Jiraiya. Maybe you will not abandon Sasuke. Maybe Sakura will become what she could have.

His eyes dart from corner to corner, searching, waiting. You are fate and fate is sealed. Uzumaki Naruto winks out of existence and the universe sighs contentedly.

 

“Do you think you’re ready for . . . I mean—that is to say—I know the elders want another Uzumaki to pass the Kyuubi down to eventually, but are _you_ on board with that?” Minato asks. He’s nervous, running his hands through his hair, and Kushina would feel bad for him if she wasn’t so pissed with the elders.

“ _Hell_ no,” she snarls. Oops. There goes her mission report. She lets the pathetic crumpled paper fall from her hand and back onto the table. “Who do the elders think they are? Ugh. Expecting me to get pregnant as if I’m not their most powerful active shinobi.”

Minato sighs, face the perfect picture of relief. “Oh, thank god. Now I have something solid to tell them . . . they’ve been bothering me for months about this.”

“I’m glad I got home in time to stop their useless clamoring, then,” Kushina says, pulling another paper from he stack and restarting her mission report. “The Uzumaki aren’t the only one who’re able to keep the Kyūbi contained, you know. If you found someone with big enough chakra reserves, you’d be set. After all . . . I’ll be too old to have children by the time I’m planning to retire.”

 

Shikamaru stands alone on the school playground, next to the swing nobody uses. His hand is extended in greeting to the empty structure. Slowly, carefully, he pulls it back to his side. He doesn’t know what he’d been doing.

 

“Team Seven will be Uchiha Sasuke, Haruno Sakura—”

“Yes!” Sakura crows, standing up in her seat. Iruka gives her a scathing glare and she sits back down. Honestly. _Children._ If he didn’t love them so much, Iruka suspects he’d have a head full of grey hairs by now. It certainly seems the case for Mizuki . .  .

“—and Tobio. Your jōnin-sensei will be Hatake Kakashi,” he finishes. Sakura doesn’t react beyond turning around in her seat to give the civilian-born kid a shy wave. He’s glad she seems to be calm after his reprimanding look. He flips the page. “Team Eight will be . . . ”

 

“Do something, Tobio!” Sakura calls out, hands cupped over her mouth. Kakashi-sensei’s trapped in the Water Prison Jutsu and his students are frozen, watching helplessly, horrified as their sensei slowly drowns.

“I—I don’t know how! I’m . . . you know who he is, right? That’s Zabuza of the bloody—” He never finishes the sentence.

The funeral is nice, at least. Team Seven’s names are etched onto the memorial stone. The Wave mission fails and Friend-Killer Kakashi regrets ever giving in to Tobio’s demands for a C-rank.

 

Orochimaru’s mouth twists up into a sneer. They’ll have to find somebody else. Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe they should learn jutsu the hard way. The thought of using the Sharingan had always seemed like an impossible cheat, anyway. Well—they’re here now. Might as well shake things up a bit. And they know who they’re starting with.

 

You are fate and fate watches over its subjects. The braid is no longer; you’d found your opportunity to give them swift deaths and you’d taken it. With each day that progresses, your ability to change things grows. Fate rules with an iron fist. You still love Naruto but now he is yours in every sense of the word. He’d owed you, you think. You had given so much, and what had he ever returned to you?

Don’t let fate define you. Carve your own path into the world.

Is that all he’d given you? You are fate and Uzumaki Naruto denied fate at every corner, every turn, every chance he got. You’d looked into the sun for too long, the image of a shining ball of potential burned into all of your senses. The candle goes out. Fate’s hands braid destinies together, tangible once more, and the winds of time blow softly. You breathe an unobstructed breath for the first time in thirteen years.

 

Tsunade cannot seem to be convinced to come back to her village. That is not to say Jiraiya didn’t try—he did, with everything he had, and still—

“It hurts too much. How can I go back?” she asks, slumped over a bar. Jiraiya’s got a hand on her back, rubbing it in soothing circles, and normally she would shrug him off but right now she seems to need the comfort.

You are fate. You didn’t change things the first time around but you will now. The beginnings of a breath form—

 

“ _NO!_ ” he screams. The world shatters.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are greatly appreciated =)


End file.
